The Missing Link - Cover story
The memristor – the recently discovered fourth circuit element – could be a major enabling technology. By Graham Pitcher.
The electronics industry is fertile ground when it comes to innovation. Whether you’re looking at new circuit techniques or advanced manufacturing processes, there is always work underway – aimed at producing smaller devices which run faster, use less power and cost less.
Yet all this work is at the leading edge of technology; pushing the boundaries of what we know by tweaking the things we already work with. What is unusual is a discovery which effectively changes the rules.
And that is what a research team from HP Labs is claiming with the discovery of the memristor – said to be the fourth basic circuit element. But the story starts much further back than you might imagine.
